Edmund (later Sir Edmund) Hillary and Tenzing Norgay during their successful first summit climb of Mount Everest, May 1953. Credit: The Granger Collection, New York

Eighty-odd years ago, when the English mountaineer George Mallory was preparing an expedition to climb Mount Everest, the highest point on Earth, a reporter asked him why he would undertake such a perilous challenge. Mallory paused for a moment and then, the story has it, gave the world his famous reply: “Because it is there.”

Everest has, of course, been “there” for millions of years, formed by the collision of great plates of rock that form Earth’s surface. European geographers knew about the great mountain long before they ever saw it, having heard reports and rumors of its existence from travelers along the ancient Silk Road who, in turn, had heard of it from the people they met along the way. Like so many stories brought back from Asia, the murmurs concerning Everest were largely dismissed as fables. Only in the early 19th century, when British surveyors working under direction of geographer George Everest began to map the 1,500-mile-long Himalaya range, was the mountain local people called Chomolungma—“the abode of the gods”—scientifically described.

Drawn by news of this imposing range, mountaineers soon began to explore the Himalayas, and by the end of the 19th century large portions of the range had been charted. The area had even become something of a tourist destination by the time Mark Twain came there in 1892, though a storm kept him from viewing Everest itself. “I did not care,” he wrote with characteristic good humor, “because I think that mountains that are as high as that are disagreeable.”

Even so, no climber, so far as history records, dared to attempt Everest’s heights before Mallory arrived there in 1922. He explored several routes before settling on a path from Tibet. With a company of native Nepalese climbers called Sherpas and a handful of fellow Englishmen, Mallory set out on this course in the spring of 1924, reaching 28,000 feet before becoming separated from the party in a snowstorm and dying in a fall. (More than 70 years would pass before his mummified body was discovered.)

This grim fact of Mallory’s disappearance did not deter other climbers from following in his ice-encrusted footprints, among them the American climber Oscar Houston, who attempted the peak in 1950 but was turned back by bad weather. Over the next two years a British Commonwealth team studied several routes, including the one Houston had tried, and settled on an approach. In April 1953 the team, led by 33-year-old New Zealand beekeeper and mountaineer Edmund Hillary, began to work its way up the mountain, establishing eight camps along a route leading below the sheer cliff called the Lhotse Face.

On May 29 Hillary and a 43-year-old Sherpa named Tenzing Norgay finally attained the long-sought distinction of being the first people to reach Everest’s summit. Hillary later wrote that his first sensation was one of relief for having survived to reach the top. “But mixed with relief,” he continued, “was a vague sense of astonishment that I should have been the lucky one to attain the ambition of so many brave and determined climbers.” He was too tired and numb from cold to feel elated, but the news of Hillary’s ascent electrified the world. By a happy coincidence that could not have been better timed, that news reached England on June 2, 1953—the very day that a young Queen Elizabeth II was formally crowned.

The North Face of Mount Everest, as seen from Tibet (China). Credit: Maria Stenzel—National Geographic/Getty Images

Sir Edmund Hillary died on January 11, 2008, at the age of 88. He will forever be known as the first man to scale the summit of Mount Everest, but he did much else besides: he served with the New Zealand forces in the Second World War; he undertook extensive philanthropic work in Nepal through the Himalayan Trust, which he founded in 1962; he was New Zealand’s ambassador to India in the 1980s; and he climbed many other mountains besides Everest. He was also, by all accounts, a modest man, waiting until Norgay’s death in 1986 to confirm the latter’s earlier admission about which of them made the summit first and consistently sharing credit for his several successes. When asked why he engaged in the dangerous pursuit of summits, he replied, “I can’t give you any fresh answers to why a man climbs mountains. The majority still go just to climb them.”

Nearly every year, now, accomplished climbers travel from around the world to Everest to test out some new route or piece of equipment, defying the English climber Bear Grylls’s thoughtful warning that “Everest is no place to prove yourself.” The technology of mountaineering has changed dramatically since Hillary’s time: when Jamling Tenzing Norgay, Tenzing Norgay’s son, climbed the mountain as part of an IMAX film expedition, as he recounts in his memoir Touching My Father’s Soul, the expedition’s Sherpas carried three tons of supplies, including “40 tents, 3,000 feet of rope, 75 bottles of oxygen, 47 tins of Spam, and endless loads of film and filming gear.” All those things were necessities. Probably not so the espresso machine that one wealthy climber is said to have brought along on the expedition Jon Krakauer chronicled in Into Thin Air—a device that, of course, a Sherpa carried.

Sometimes climbers on Everest pay with their lives or sustain grievous injuries. Most times they travel without incident, and they continue to set records of many kinds. Just this month, for instance, a 25-year-old Saudi Arabian women, Raha Moharrak, scaled the summit. The preceding February, a 29-year-old Nepali Sherpa woman named Chhurim attained the peak not once but twice in a single week. Other records await on this 60th anniversary of Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay’s great achievement, and there will always be men and women willing to endure the supreme test that Everest provides—just because it is there.